


her colours are blush and bashful

by itaintbabyshampoo



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: 60s, F/F, Flower Power, Lesbian AU, Slow Burn, The Summer of Love, as in katya isnt in the first chapter at all, cis girl au, hippie culture, its 1967 (sort of), like very slow burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-04 18:27:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17309657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itaintbabyshampoo/pseuds/itaintbabyshampoo
Summary: "Suddenly she’s an elastic band; stretched between two prone fingers, being unexpectedly launched into the world with an indeterminable velocity and no discernible direction. "It's 1967, The Summer of Love, and the world is changing at an unprecedented speed. Does Trixie Mattel have what it takes to keep up in a world where she doesn't quite know where she fits?





	1. be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

**Author's Note:**

> okay so 
> 
> i literally haven’t written anything creatively since my high school days (and those ended in 2015) and the only attempt at fic writing i ever did was some my chemical romance stories waaaaay back when so pls don’t judge too harshly. i am neither american, nor was i alive in the 60’s (duh) so a LOT of artistic license has been and will be taken with this so pls bare that in mind! 
> 
> anyways, i hope someone out there likes this (even just a little bit) but fair warning it is a bit shit lol

  
  
It’s a sweltering Tuesday in May when Trixie Mattel finally snaps.  
  
  
  
Suddenly she’s an elastic band; stretched between two prone fingers, being unexpectedly launched into the world with an indeterminable velocity and no discernible direction.  
  
  
Twenty minutes ago, she was sat around the dining room table with her family saying Grace over lunch, asking her siblings to pass the salt and now she’s barrelling down the pristine lawn of her family’s ancestral home like a bullet flying out of one of her Daddy’s shotguns, strands of her blond beehive hair coming loose and flying everywhere. Trixie makes a conscious effort to dig the heel of her modest sling-backs into the green grass as she hurtles down it and kicks her way through a few flowerbeds for good measure.  
  
  
“Beatrice! Beatrice, come back here _now!_ Gosh darn it Jim, look what she’s doin’ to my daisies! Jim, get out here and help me _now,_ ” shouts her mother from behind her, footsteps thumping out a rhythm on the grass. Trixie grips the handle of her brown leather suitcase tighter in her sweaty palm and speeds up to a pace nothing short of a military march – her mother stands no chance of catching up to her so it doesn’t matter really, she’s built like her Daddy’s side of the family, or so her Momma used to say; all long, strong legs with the big strides and round hips to match.  
  
  
“Let her go, Annelle! She’s a lost cause that one, the Devil’s got her tight! She’s his problem now,” comes the booming voice of her father from behind the threshold of the front door of the cream coloured colonial house. For a fraction of a second Trixie thinks about turning around, marching back up there and knocking him upside the head with her satin gloved hands.  
  
  
“Trixie, baby please! Just talk to me for a minute, we can fix this,” huffs out her Mom from her pitiful smokers’ lungs, over-exerted from the small sprint down the lawn and the hurdles over the flowerbeds she and Trixie had planted last spring. Trixie can’t think about that right now, doesn't have the time to dwell on the memories she's leaving further behind with every step she takes.  
  
  
Trixie stops and turns so suddenly that her tiny mother comes barrelling straight into her broad chest; some of her make-up rubs off onto the white blouse Trixie's wearing. She goes rigid as her mother reaches up and grabs her by the shoulders, gripping the fabric of her peach bolero tight. Up this close, she can see the wet clumps of brown mascara around her Momma’s eyes and the tear tracks running down her powdered face.  
  
  
“Momma let me go. Now.”  
  
  
“Trixie, please, just … c-come back inside. We can fix this, we can get you help baby. You’re just sick. We’ll bring Doctor Fisher to the house, a-and Pastor Jones. We’ll fix ya’ right up baby,” cries her Mother, pleading desperately with her eyes and clinging to Trixie’s shoulders like she's a dead man's switch. Trixie tries to look anywhere but at the tree-bark brown irises that are a mirror image of her own, attempting to shrug off the vice grip bracketing her deltoids instead.  
  
  
“I’m not sick Momma. You can’t fix what isn’t broken! Now let me go. Please,” Trixie grits out through clenched teeth; she can’t cry, not now and definitely not here.  
  
  
Out of the corners of her wet and wandering eyes she can see her neighbour, Old Mrs Boudreaux, standing on her porch and throwing what Trixie would bet her life on is Holy Water in her direction. _Jesus suffering fuck._ Trixie thinks it's a small miracle that the woman hasn't started trying to expel the devil himself from inside of her yet. She counts her blessings.  
  
  
“ _Goodbye Momma,”_ is all Trixie has left to say as she lurches herself free from her mother’s grip. She keeps her head held high as she walks down onto the sidewalk, with her family watching on as well as her neighbours spectating from behind twitching curtains and from under the cover of their porch stoops. In a final valiant act of youth, Trixie swings her suitcase up and bashes the right wing-mirror clean off her father’s beloved powder blue Corvette and makes a point to not bother glancing back to check for a reaction.  
  
  
And with that, Beatrice Mattel walks away from the only life she’s ever known for the past twenty-two years, with absolutely nothing to lose and quite possibly everything to gain. She thinks she might, quite possibly, be completely fucked.  
  
  
  
 - - - - - - - - - - - -  
  
  
  
Trixie’s newly formed liberation plot doesn’t quite go off without a hitch. Not that she had much time to formulate the plan in the twenty or so minutes it took for her deepest secret to come tumbling out over a phone line and a lunch of grits and grillades. She figures beggars can’t exactly be choosers though, it is what it is now; her life might have just been upended, but this isn't a Hollywood production. She's from _Louisiana_ for Christ sake.  
  
  
It takes her almost an hour to walk to the bus station and she can already feel a prickly sunburn blossoming on the back of her neck where neither her hair nor jacket cover it, and her scalp sort of stings too; she wishes she’d brought her pill-box hat, she'd worked hard to afford that hat. The newly formed blisters on the soles of her feet pulsate in response to the pressure of carrying her plump weight for miles in heels, and there’s a fine layer of dirty dust from the roads clinging to her face, over her melting make-up and sweat. Her face feels gritty and waxy.  
  
  
Trixie Mattel is a mess, but Trixie Mattel is also currently past caring.  
  
  
She barges in through the doors of the ticket office at the bus station with all of the grace of a bear on stilts, and makes a beeline for the telephone box in the wall there. There’s a bit of a line, so she drops her suitcase to the floor and shoves it with her foot as the line shuffles along slowly, pokes and prods at the pressure blisters forming on her palms from gripping the worn handle the whole walk here.  
  
  
When it comes her turn to call, Trixie digs into the pocket of her bolero jacket for her loose change purse and her tiny name-book and flicks all the way through to the P’s. She pushes a few nickels into the slot, dials the number and hopes. _Please pick up, please pick up, please pick up._ The dial tone rings four times.  
  
  
“ _Hello?”_ Comes the dulcet tones from the other end of the static filled line. _Thank God._  
  
  
“Uh, Pearl, hi. It’s uh- it’s Beatrice Mattel,”  
  
  
“ _Oh, Trixie Pixie! Hi, hello. How are you?”_ comes the surprisingly chipper response from her old friend. Pearl had lived in the neighbourhood too but had ran off with a local down-and-out boy a few years before and it had been the talk of the town ever since. Well, that'll be until Trixie’s own little drama undoubtedly breaks into the social scene, and with half the street looking on at the little spectacle on her front lawn, she figures it'll be news sooner rather than later.  
  
  
“Look uh, I need a favour. And feel free to say no,” _For the love of all that is holy please don’t say no,_ “Something’s happened. At home, I mean. Is there any chance I can come stay?”  
  
  
Trixie takes a quick inhale to steady her resolve and before Pearl even has the chance to reply, she’s spouting more words out at the same speed as a whippet being released from a kennel at a racetrack.  
  
  
“I won’t be any trouble I promise, I-I’ve got money and everything I just need a place to sleep and I promise I’ll stay out of your hair but, uh, obviously if that’s too much I totally understand it’s just that-”  
  
  
“ _Woah, woah, woah, calm down buddy. It’s all chill. Just gimme a call once you get in and I’ll find you,”_ Pearl takes twice the time to say half the words Trixie just vomited out.  
  
  
“Thank you. Thank you so much, Pearlie Girl. I’ll call soon.”  
  
  
Her pre-paid time runs out and the line goes dead before Pearl has a chance to reply. Trixie breathes a sigh of something; it’s not quite relief, but she is suddenly very glad Pearl sent her a letter with her new contact information in it all those months ago. She picks up her suitcase, turns about and heads straight to the ticket counter. The lady behind the desk is prim, proper and very much not covered in a layer of dirt, or visibly perspiring. Trixie sort of definitely hates her for it.  
  
  
“One ticket to San Francisco, please.”  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> story title comes from steel magnolias and the chapter title comes from that one song about san francisco


	2. you and i travel to the beat of a different drum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Oh bitch,” Katya turns to look at her incredulously and Trixie goes wide-eyed at the nickname. “It is the place to be. Art, music, love; you’ll find it all there in that little microcosm on the grass. Haven’t you seen it on the news? Haven’t you seen me on the news?”_
> 
> _Trixie shakes her head and Pearl gives an airy chuckle._
> 
> _“What Katya means to say is that The Hill is what we call our little patch of heaven in Golden Gate Park. We hang out there most days. And bitch, you were not on the news. You saw some unbrushed blonde hair and just assumed it was you,” Pearl explains, fixing Katya with a look that lets Trixie know that Katya was very much not featured on the television at any point._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hiiii. university started back last week so my time is literally no longer my own, plus i started a new job and now my flatmates have decided we have to fit in four years worth of things before graduation, but i’ve really enjoyed writing this. it’s still very much a whole load of nothing but i know how i want it to end, so we’re getting there wooo!!! 
> 
> anyway this is full of grammatical errors because that’s just who i am but whoever is reading this i hope you enjoy x

Her entire life, people have called Trixie a dumb little southern-belle. Simple-minded, dense, dim; if you can name it, she’s been called it. Trixie herself never did listen to them, but it certainly didn’t help or alleviate the passing comments any once she’d dyed her hair sunflower blonde or learned what a bouncy blow-dry was. 

Sure, she’s grown up privileged; she’s a Mattel. Her family live in the second nicest house in all of Chinquapin Parish, overshadowed only by that of the Governor, his wife and daughter. The Mattel’s are considered one of the few old money families left in the great state and are well respected by many in northwest Louisiana because of that single fact, and Trixie has spent her entire life having it drilled into her just how important it is to uphold that social standing. 

Trixie was her mother and father’s first-born, and at twenty-two she is four years older than her twin brothers and six years older than her little sister. Trixie knows deep in her soul that she has always been a let-down to her father; there was always a slight resentment towards her, burning just under the surface of the man. 

When little Beatrice Mattel had emerged from her mother’s womb in all her bloody, screaming glory, her father had been disappointed; he always has been and probably always will be a sexist man; a product of his generation, and Trixie figured he had likely spent the nights prior to her birth praying to God for a son.

When Beatrice wasn’t accepted to any Ivy League schools despite numerous private, late-night phone calls to the Deans of said schools and promises of substantial deposits of money in return for her enrolment, her father had been silently disappointed in her once again. 

And when Beatrice hadn’t been married off by the age of twenty-one such as the daughters of his friends and associates had, Mr Mattel had still been just as disappointed in her as the day she had slid right on out into his carefully crafted life.

Instead Trixie has spent her adult years accompanying her mother to luncheons, and galas, and private balls. No one ever asks her about politics, or the war raging in a far-away foreign land. People only ever want to know whether she wishes she looked more like Brigitte Bardot, or if she is pleased about her younger brothers both being accepted to Dartmouth, or even on one occasion if she had read the glossy cover of a recent magazine reporting on how she could Lose 20lbs TODAY!

She selfishly hopes that her mother will miss her, maybe even feel her absence profoundly. She knows her father will not – he’ll only resent the fact of having to explain her sudden departure to the inquisitive inhabitants and curtain twitchers of their little southern town. 

For the most part she’s fought quietly, albeit vehemently, to dispel and disprove the image many people have of her despite her family’s grand-standing, however now Trixie is seven hours into the almost two-day long bus journey that separates her from California and she thinks that maybe there is some truth behind their sentiments after all.

\----------

The lady sitting in front of her has been throwing up almost quarter-hourly into plastic sandwich bags since long before they even passed over state lines into Texas; she made a conscious effort to sit as far apart from the vomiting lady as possible when they transferred to a different service in Lubbock, but she can still hear the retching over the grumbling noise of the engine beneath her and the putrid smell lingers heavy in the humid air of the bus. 

The bus hurtles on driving all through the night before it stops at another service station in Arizona in the early light of dawn. Trixie’s never been to this part of the country before – she’s never even travelled outside of Louisiana – but she likes it immediately. There’s a beauty in the orange desert hills that she can see in the distance, being bathed in the first sun of the day. She likes the contrast of the sparsely littered green cacti and succulents sprouting from the ground against the rust coloured sand. 

The rest-stop is scheduled to last thirty minutes and Trixie decides to use her time wisely. Her heavy foundation and thick black eye-liner has all but melted from her face in the heat, leaving her with clogged pores and carbon coloured smudges over her temples where she dozed off on her propped-up fists. 

She holes up inside the tiny single-stall bathroom at the road-side diner they’ve stopped at and splashes luke warm tap water on her face and rubs at the black streaks with the rough tissue paper from the broken dispenser; the front cover has fallen off and the little paper napkins tumble out every time a gust of wind blows in from the gap beneath the door. 

The rough paper irritates her face and leaves her skin looking blotchy. Trixie thinks about reapplying her make-up; except for her childhood she can’t really recall a day in which she hasn’t worn any but decides against it – she still has at least another fifteen hours of travelling ahead of her and has already pushed her pores well past their breaking point. 

Trixie uses the loose change from her little coin purse to buy a coffee and a grilled cheese. She sits at the long steel-topped counter by herself and eats quietly, trying not to think about the drastic life choices she’s made in the past twenty-four hours, although she does wonder whether she remembered to pack her favourite hot pink cat-eye sunglasses or not. 

She buys a slice of apple pie in a little container from the glass display cabinet and hurries back on out to the desolate parking lot when she sees the people she recognises as her anonymous travel companions heading back the bus. She makes towards the window seat near the rear that she has claimed as her own, kicks her little heels off and curls up into herself as the dusty orange landscape starts to blur past her once more. She grips her little container of pie tight in her hands, curls up in her bolero jacket and prays that she hasn’t fucked her whole life up beyond repair. 

\---------------  
Trixie calls Pearl from the final rest-stop they arrive at. She picks up on the third ring and sounds just as sluggish as before, but assures Trixie in what seems like as few words as possible that she’ll be there to collect her at the stance once the bus arrives in San Francisco in just under four hours.

Trixie spends the remainder of the journey into California feeling like she might vomit, and after so many hours of trundling down the highways in a rickety tin-can of a bus she knows that it isn’t motion sickness. She thinks about asking the lady from earlier if she has any of her trusty sandwich bags left over. 

Trixie’s never been a risk taker, and that’s the Gods-honest truth of it. Her whole life Trixie towed the line very carefully: she never stayed out past her curfew, didn’t steal swigs of brandy from her Daddy’s liquor cabinet and she’s never smoked a cigarette. Her life has always had order and she has always had a purpose until now, even if said purpose was nothing more than to stand still, smile and look pretty. 

The thought of the unknown makes her excited; it makes her dare to dream that she’s destined for more than dinner functions, puffy satin dresses and having to waltz with dreary old men, but it also makes her feel like she has a stomach ulcer anytime she thinks about how truly by herself she is now and how running from the consequences of her actions is only a temporary band aid on the whole situation.

Trixie’s spent the last twenty-two years always having someone around to tell her where to be, what to do and who to be. Now she’s gone rogue without really having a clue what to do with herself. Trixie knows that most people wouldn’t even consider travelling to a state they’ve only ever seen on news bulletins, to a city they’ve only heard bewildering tales of from the ladies in their mother’s church group or the hair salon but it’s what she’s done, and she’s determined to at least fake some courage in her convictions. 

\--------------

The bus finally pulls into Trixie’s stance in San Francisco just as the sun begins to set. The bus driver helps lug her brown suitcase out from the hold and soon enough Trixie is by herself with her suitcase in hand with her still-blistered feet slowly beginning to ache again. 

She looks around for Pearl, stretching out her stiff neck. She’s beginning to panic that the girl has somehow forgotten and that she’ll be stranded in a city she knows nothing about. She’s pulled out of her internal meltdown when she hears her name being called from down the street. Trixie turns to her right and sees a girl she doesn’t recognise slowly meandering towards her. It’s only as the girl gets close enough for Trixie to be able to make out her facial features that she realises it’s Pearl. 

Pearl looks exactly like all the girls Trixie has seen in the local newspapers her father tried to hide from her, smiling faces printed in black and white above stories about drug-related deaths and sexual promiscuity. 

Gone are Pearl’s painstakingly bleached long blonde locks, her many dye jobs having been replaced with her own natural mousy-brown roots. She’s wearing a flowing tie-dye skirt, swirling blue and white patterns billowing in the light evening wind. Her top looks like an at-home macramé project, and she’s tied a bandana with feathers attached to it around her hairline. The sun has already set but she’s still wearing little purple tinted, round sunglasses. 

She looks like one of the girls her Daddy would have called a good-for-nothing miscreant. 

Pearl envelopes Trixie in a short hug: the girl is waif-thin, yet she has an unexpected vice-like grip. Trixie’s still clutching her suitcase and can’t move her arms from Pearl’s hold so she can’t hug her back, but the other girl doesn’t seem to notice. 

“Oh my god, hi! I’m so glad you made it here in once piece,” Pearl says as she pulls back from Trixie. 

“It was touch and go for a while out there, but I made it.” Trixie would have thrown her hands out in a little ta-da jazz hands gesture if she wasn’t still holding her luggage. 

Pearl offers to take the suitcase from her and despite a need to seem courteous, Trixie happily hands it over. Pearl tells her it’s only a short walk from the bus stop to where she lives in Haight-Ashbury, a place Trixie has never heard of. She lives with three other girls; one officially, two of them unofficially. 

“Well there’s Kim; she’s a student at the university – mostly she keeps to herself but she’s a real doll, very pretty. And then there’s Katya and well, best let you meet her for yourself,” Pearl tells Trixie. Apparently this Katya girl is too much of a personality for Pearl to even begin to describe on their commute. 

“And then there’s my cousin, Farrah. You’ve met her before, do you remember?”

Trixie thinks she remembers. Farrah came to visit Pearl one summer a few years ago. She didn’t leave much of an impression on Trixie other than that she seemed to cry a lot over the slightest things and that everything seemed to be a horrible inconvenience to the girl, but Trixie remembers her being nice enough although she struggles to recall what she looked like. 

They stop at a little pizzeria on route to the apartment and get a large cheese feast. Trixie tries to give Pearl some dollars from her little purse, but she refuses and claims that the pizza is Trixie’s moving in present, which makes Trixie smile. 

They make small talk about the place they both previously called home, but thankfully Pearl doesn’t ask Trixie about what’s brought her all the way to California. Trixie feels like she owes her some sort of explanation purely out of appreciation for taking her in at such short notice, but she doesn’t have it in her to open that particular can of worms just yet. 

They eventually get to the apartment. It’s dark out so Trixie can’t really make out much despite the glow of the street lamps. The stone Victorian building seems to stretch up right into the sky above them and Trixie wants to cry at the thought of climbing the stairs right to the top: she never knew sitting on a bus for two days straight could be so exhausting, but Pearl must see the look on her face because she quickly assures her that they only have to make it to the second floor. 

The apartment is spacious and wildly decorated; there seems to be a potted plant everywhere Trixie looks, as well as candles dotted around in various stages of melting. Pearl tells Trixie she can use her bedroom to change into something more comfortable before they eat and points her in the right direction. 

Pearl’s bedroom looks exactly like the rest of the apartment, but Trixie doesn’t take much time to look around, doesn’t want Pearl to think she’s snooping. She opens her suitcase and pulls out her little knee-length powder pink nightgown. She thinks about rooting around and trying to see what she managed to pack in her mad-dash around her childhood bedroom but then her stomach growls loudly and she decides that that’s tomorrows problem. 

Trixie emerges back into the living room and finds Pearl stuffing a greasy pizza slice into her mouth, sitting beside an incredibly tall girl on the couch. Trixie treads lightly across the carpeted floor and sits on a futon across the other side of the table from the girls. 

“Trixie, this is Kim. Kim, this is Trixie,” Pearl says through a bite of pizza, sucking in air to combat the temperature of the melted cheese. 

Kim mutters a greeting; Trixie can just about make out what seems to be a heavy lisp, and then she shuffles two slices of the pizza onto a little side plate before disappears back towards what Trixie assumes is her bedroom. A heavy feeling settles in Trixie’s stomach at the realisation that even though Pearl had agreed to house her happily, Kim might not feel as charitable. She hopes these other girls, Katya and Farrah, feel differently. And even if they don’t, it’s not like Trixie has many other options. 

“Don’t worry about Kim, I’ll talk to her. She doesn’t mind you being here, honestly,” Pearl tries to reassure Trixie, but it doesn’t work. She picks at a slice of pizza, suddenly not as hungry as before.  
Soon enough Trixie’s eyelids are drooping as Pearl chats slowly to her about their old neighbourhood. Pearl notices and decides to head to bed herself for which Trixie is grateful. She fetches Trixie a blanket from her closet, tells her she’s free to pass out on the couch, and that she’ll see her in the morning as she walks off to her bedroom. 

Trixie lies down on the couch, body too long to fit on it comfortably, and falls asleep in a what feels like a matter of seconds.

\--------------

Trixie has been a light sleeper all her life; waking at the crack of dawn with the birds, at the click-clack sounds of glass bottles rattling as the milkman’s van made the rounds through her neighbourhood, or even with the creaks and groans of her family’s grand old house in the humid nights as it expanded in the dark. Yet, the second her head hits the armrest of Pearl’s moth-eaten fabric sofa, the bone-tired girl is out like a bulb who’s weary-worn filament has finally called it a day. 

She’s in the sort of dreamless sleep that one can only imagine befalls the dead, despite the hazy noises that filter in through the single-glazed windows from the streets below, permeating through the thick and sun-bleached emerald curtains that cover the huge bay-window.

Trixie is dead to the world right up until a substantial weight seemingly falls out of the sky, straight through the ceiling, and lands right on top of her sleeping form. She’s screaming before her eyes have even opened, desperately trying to push herself upright as the palm of her outstretched hand slips off the edge of the sofa and hinders her progress. 

She’s still screaming as her eyes fly open and a sticky hand is thrust over her mouth, silencing her; or well, muffling the sound at best. Three loud thuds emanate from the wall of Kim’s bedroom that borders the living room. Shit. Trixie can feel her heartbeat in her throat and is half convinced her heart now resides in her oesophagus too.

“Jesus Christ, you’ll wake the dead with a set of lungs like that,” says the source of her distress, a girl who is still sitting slap bang on top of a rigid Trixie, with her sweaty palm still clamped over Trixie’s full lips and slightly crooked teeth.

Trixie’s chest is heaving as she flicks her eyes down towards the girl’s hand, and then back up at her face. Trixie thinks that she might have failed to even realise she’s put it there in the first place. 

“Oh shit, sorry,” the girl drops her hand limply at her side, grazing Trixie’s thigh. 

Trixie unconsciously licks the sticky residue from her lips and just stares dumbfoundedly at the girl, who for her part hasn’t moved and is smiling gormlessly at Trixie with teeth that are so white they’re only a shade away from actually glowing in the dark. Trixie can tell her eyes are blood-shot even in the dark of the living room and she smells slightly of smoke and something with a sweeter, more herbal and almost earthy undertone to it that Trixie can’t quite place. 

Watching the girl is like watching an ant crawl through molasses. She blinks and breathes so slowly that Trixie thinks maybe time has actually shifted out of pace, or that she’s dreaming. But then the girl laughs, grunts, and rolls herself right off Trixie and straight onto the carpeted floor below, and okay, Trixie is definitely dreaming because who the fuck does that? 

Trixie just lies there and stares up at the ceiling with her hands clutching Pearl’s old crochet blanket up around her chest. The room is silent apart from her still heavy breathing and the little shifts on the carpet as the girl apparently makes herself comfortable – even if this is all a dream, Trixie’s glad the girl didn’t knock herself unconscious or fall through a floorboard in her graceless descent to the carpet below. 

“I’m Katya. You’re on my sofa.” A hand is slowly extended up from the floor towards Trixie and despite her better judgement and general confusion, she shakes it. The angle is awkward and it makes her wrist hurt. Katya’s hand is still sticky. 

“Uh, sorry. I guess I’ll take the floor then,” says Trixie, making no real effort to move from the sofa she’s called bed for a solid few hours at this point, or to even introduce herself to this girl, Katya, who is currently lying spread-eagle on the floor next to the sofa. 

“No mama, no ma’am. You stay put; keep the sofa and I’ll take the floor. I like the floor. It’s like an orthopaedic mattress, except it’s not because well, it’s a floor. But my point still stands. Floors are very underrated.” 

Katya slams her palms on said floor with a dull thud at the end of her little tirade and Trixie just mumbles her thanks before mentally tapping out on what she still thinks might possibly be just a very mundane yet odd hallucination. Katya doesn’t notice the lack of a reply and is instead just giggling up at the high ceiling of the living room.

She rolls over to face the backrest of the sofa, closes her eyes and prays to God that this Katya girl doesn’t try to murder her in her sleep or attempt to keep talking. 

\------------

Trixie wakes in the morning with a crick in her neck and a layer of sweat sitting atop the fuzzy little blonde hairs of her top lip. She can hear who she assumes to be Pearl and Kim talking in rapid, hushed tones in the kitchen that’s down the hallway from the living room. 

Trixie sits up on the sofa and sees that the same girl from the night before – Katya, apparently – is still very much unconscious, and is lying on the fawn carpet like she’s a chalk outline at a crime scene. She’s lost her trousers somewhere during the night and her black underwear is clear for the world to see. 

What Trixie hadn’t noticed last night was the hat – if you could even call it that – that Katya now has thrown over her entire face. It looks like the roadkill Trixie’s father used to scrape off the street just outside of their yard in the early morning, except someone has sewn in two mis-matched googly eyes just above the snout of whatever animal it used to be. She wonders how Katya manages to keep from sweating through the heavy fur fabric of it in the sun coming in through a gap in the curtains. 

Trixie feels as though the little beady, all-knowing eyes are boring right into her soul, so she turns away, stretching out her tight upper limbs in the process. She gets up off the sofa, careful not to stand on Katya’s sleeping form and pads barefoot towards the kitchen, searching for coffee and whatever breakfast she can scrounge from the girls. As she approaches the closed door, she can hear Pearl and Kim’s rapid conversation clearly now. 

“Seriously Pearl, you cannot just be bringing in waifs and strays whenever you feel like it! Who even is this Tracey?” 

Trixie stops dead in the hallway, her fingers ghosting over the door handle. 

“Oh, come off it Kimberley. And it’s Trixie by the way, not Tracey. Beatrice if you want to be pedantic,” Pearl scoffs back. Trixie wishes she was still unconscious. 

“Look all I’m saying is that you have no idea why she’s here. For all we know, she’s murdered her whole family and gone on the run, and you being you, have just welcomed her into her home with open arms!” Trixie can hear Kim becoming more and more exasperated and although she’s hurt, she sort of understands. If the shoe was on the other foot, Trixie doesn’t think she’d be too keen to let a stranger sleep on her living room sofa. 

“Loosen your panty elastic Kim, she once cried at Sunday School after accidentally stepping on a snail, I highly doubt she’s flipped the switch and taken up homicide as a hobby.”

It's the most words Trixie has heard Pearl string into a sentence since she got off the bus, and it makes her feel equal parts relieved at Pearl’s character defence but also guilty that it’s even needed in the first place. Trixie thinks she really should have told Pearl about the situation at home, but despite legging it across the country, she can’t find it in her to utter the reason why. She’s not ashamed, she’s just not ready to speak it out into the world for all to hear yet. 

Trixie’s momentarily lost in her thoughts and doesn’t realise the conversation has tailed off until the door flies open and she’s met with Kim’s startled face. Kim at least has the good grace to look slightly ashamed that Trixie presumably overheard her ranting, whereas Pearl just looks nonchalant; Trixie wonders if she somehow knew she was accidentally eavesdropping the whole time, considers for a split second that maybe the girl has that x-ray vision like the characters in all the comic books her brothers used to read. 

Kim just shuffles past her and disappears down the hallway towards her bedroom. 

“Morning Trix, sleep well?” Asks Pearl, completely glossing over what just happened. Trixie is perfectly at ease to pretend that she didn’t just hear Kim ask if she’d slain her whole family. Even fake ignorance is bliss. 

“Yeah, yeah, I slept fine. Couch is real comfy!” Trixie knows that she’s overcompensating, and that Pearl knows that the couch is not comfortable in the slightest. 

Trixie takes a seat at the small table next to the kitchen window and Pearl pours her a mug of coffee from the percolator brewing on the stove. She offers her a pineapple pastry from the fridge which Trixie happily takes, swallows it down in four bites as Pearl picks mindlessly at hers. They sit in amicable silence and watch the people on the street below mull around in the morning sunshine from the window. Trixie mentally catalogues all the names of the colourful little shops that line the street that she couldn’t see in the dark of the previous night. She wonders what sort of establishment lies below Pearl and Kim’s apartment. 

Trixie’s helping herself to another cup of coffee when Katya burst into the kitchen, using her hands to jump up and sit on the countertop. She’s lost her hat somewhere in her travels from the living room to the kitchen; her natural ashy blonde curls wave down her back and almost reflect the sunlight streaming in through the adjacent window. Her shirt is a see-through navy-blue mesh affair and Trixie makes a conscious effort not to stare at her peachy nipples that are visible through the thin material.

“Morning Kat,” Pearl says through a yawn as she flips through the days newspaper. 

Katya’s short legs dangle high up off the floor and her bare feet bash gracelessly against the cupboard door underneath the countertop. Trixie can see that her toenails are painted an ugly moss green. 

“This is Trixie by the way, the girl I told you about on Tuesday? Trixie this is Katya.” Pearl introduces them to each other, blissfully unaware of Trixie’s traumatic awakening on the couch. Trixie turns and sees Katya looking at her curiously.

“Oh yeah, we met through a bump in the night. Nice to put a name to the face, Trixie.” 

Pearl looks from Katya to Trixie and then back again. She’s clearly confused but doesn’t push the issue. Pearl is the most laid-back girl Trixie has ever met. “Any idea where Farrah has got to?” Pearl asks Katya.

“Honestly? No. We dropped some acid on The Hill at sunset and I haven’t seen her since; things got a little murky but very funky after that,” grins Katya. 

Trixie’s never heard anyone speak so openly about their drug use before and she’s honestly a little shocked; Katya doesn’t look like the bums that hang around the rougher streets of Chinquapin Parish, the ones with track marks in their arms and no light behind their eyes. She’s also a little unsettled by how calm Pearl and Katya seem about Farrah’s apparent disappearance, but she doesn’t push the issue. Instead she asks what Katya means by The Hill. 

“Oh bitch,” Katya turns to look at her incredulously and Trixie goes wide-eyed at the nickname. “It is the place to be. Art, music, love; you’ll find it all there in that little microcosm on the grass. Haven’t you seen it on the news? Haven’t you seen me on the news?” 

Trixie shakes her head and Pearl gives an airy chuckle.

“What Katya means to say is that The Hill is what we call our little patch of heaven in Golden Gate Park. We hang out there most days. And bitch, you were not on the news. You saw some unbrushed blonde hair and just assumed it was you,” Pearl explains, fixing Katya with a look that lets Trixie know that Katya was very much not featured on the television at any point. 

Katya scrunches up her face and sticks her tongue out at Pearl and jumps down from the counter.

\-----------

They eat four more fruit filled pastries between the three of them with no sign of Kim emerging from her bedroom, before Pearl announces that she must go and get ready for work. She had told Trixie yesterday that she works in a record shop three blocks over from Haight-Ashbury, and that she could get her great discounts on all the recent releases. Trixie had never heard of any the artists she mentioned and even if she had, she has no idea how long the money she stole from her parent’s bedroom dresser during her escape routine would last her to even think about buying something as frivolous as a record. 

Pearl ruffles Katya’s hair and promises to take Trixie over to The Hill to experience it for herself later in the day and tells her to use her bedroom as if it were her own, then she leaves Trixie and Katya alone in the kitchen. 

An awkward silence settles over the two blondes left at the kitchen table. Katya fiddles with a salt shaker and Trixie looks at her chipped nail polish. Other than the encounter during the night and a brief introduction a half hour earlier from Pearl, Trixie knows nothing about Katya except what colour her nipples are. She’s thinking about making an escape to Pearl’s bedroom to think over exactly what the fuck she’s going to do with her life now, when Katya pipes up. 

“Hey uhm, Kim told me what happened – about you overhearing. I just wanted to tell you not to worry about it. Kim’s just … cautious. I mean, not that she has any need to be, y-you seem lovely!” Trixie can almost see the cogs turning in Katya’s head trying to come up with an explanation that won’t insult her. It’s almost comical to watch. 

“I mean it could be worse,” Katya continues before Trixie can respond, “when I first showed up here, Kim straight up pretended not to speak a word of English for a whole week! Do you know how many foreign-language books I had to check out from the library just to try and string a sentence together?!” Katya’s hands flail out at her sides, one nudging Trixie in her shoulder. 

Trixie laughs at the mental image of this erratic girl trying to sit herself down and learn an entirely new language just in a bid to make a friend. It also kind of warms her heart and as she looks at Katya; who’s staring into space with a foolish grin plastered on her face at the memory, she hopes selfishly that this girl will go to such lengths to be her friend too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chinquapin parish doesn't actually exist; it's from the play/film steel magnolias, i just didn't want to butcher a real place i've never been to lol. chapter title comes from the song 'different drum' by the stone poneys. kudos to you if you made it through these 5000 words of utter rambling.


End file.
